Review by New York Times Review
THE short-story writer George Saunders apparently has a Thing for Capital Letters. His first collection of nonfiction is Chock Full of Them - phrases like "Men Who Fish" and "Big Naïve Philosophical Realizations" and "American Male Opinionated Chatterbox" and "Appallingly Porous Border Syndrome," to name but a few. These locutions resonate with Wiseguy Knowingness and serve as the literary equivalent of People Making Quote Marks With Their Fingers. They're kind of flirtatious, too. Saunders invites a conspiratorial intimacy between writer and reader with the Capitalized Phrases, offering entry into an Exclusive Club for People Who Get It. In the process, he simultaneously billboards the Notion-at-Hand while suggesting that he won't be caught Taking His Own Thought Too Seriously. By such turns are Heaviness and Lightness balanced. And maybe, as a Chicago-raised guy, he goofs on himself to show he's not some East Coast Intellectual Twit. One suspects that the irony of this maneuver is there to protect the very Midwestern Sweetness of the Author's Soul. For George Saunders has a Very Sweet Soul indeed. Take this example from a report on his trip to the surreal city of Dubai. Instead of a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, we have a Midwestern Liberal in a Middle-Eastern Theme Park. At an amusement park reminiscent of a setting from his fiction, Saunders watches "the Glowering Muttering Arabs" and 15 members of the United States Navy go down a waterslide in quick succession. By the end of the ride, everybody is in high spirits. This leads Saunders to speculate that fun might be the basis for universal brotherhood. "Given enough time," he writes, "we will all be brothers. ... The old dividers - nation, race, religion - will be overpowered by cross-breeding and by our mass media, our world Culture o' Enjoyment." Later in the same trip, he shows up at the "Arabian Ice City," where Arab children slip and slide on artificial snow (or "Snow," as Saunders likes to put it), with their parents proudly recording the moment with video cameras. "This is sweet," he scribbles in his notebook. His eyes "well up with tears." His view of the "Arab street" is complicated by all of these Arabs in the Snow. "If everybody in America could see this, our foreign policy would change," he writes. Readers daunted by the complexities of actual history, however, might be pardoned for wondering whether Saunders's interpretation of this Snow Globe of Brotherhood represents more than Wishful Thinking. To put it another way, the Fake Snow of Artificial Heaven doth fall on Jews and Jew-haters alike, on Infidels and Believers, on Virtuous Muslims and Great Satans. But such divisions are not addressed. If only Saunders's Soft Heart were accompanied by a Hard Head, then this report might tend more toward the Tragic than the Platitudinous. Similarly, in the title essay, a blast against the media, Saunders proposes that "our venture in Iraq was a literary failure," meaning a failure of the imagination. If you want to look at it that way, our failure to discover cold fusion or build safe bridges are all literary failures: we've failed to imagine our way to successful outcomes. This view is akin to a hydrologist suggesting that our failure in Iraq is largely a matter of irrigation, or a doctor attributing it to a problem of diagnosis. The sentiments are noble, the analysis solipsistic. Saunders, the imaginative artist, has failed to imagine other reasons for the catastrophe in Iraq besides the failure to imagine. The Willful Innocence that mars several of the political pieces might have been predicted from Saunders's often bril liant short stories, which generally feature hapless, good-hearted yobs as protagonists. He uses what I'll call the Apparent Doofus Technique, whereby an author invents a seemingly innocent character who will become illuminated in the course of the action and come to Greater Moral Understanding. The problem with this is that at the very appearance of the Apparent Doofus, readers know what is on the way - not an education, but a Life-Enhancing Epiphany. In the dazzling "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline," for instance, the narrator, while being stabbed to death by a crazy Vietnam vet, envisions "the man I could have been, and the man I was." He sees into his killer's past: his rough childhood, his brutal mother. "And then," says the narrator, "everything is bright and new and keen with love." At the heart of this heartless world beats Something Suspiciously Like Sentimentality. As a fiction writer, Saunders was born to forgive. And yet, the Tireless American Good Will of this son of Chicago tends to wear down a Reader's Resistance, not to men tion - even more impressively - his Recalcitrant Subjects. In the best of the dispatches in "The Braindead Megaphone," he travels along the Mexican-American bor der between Brownsville, Tex., and San Diego. In Texas, he goes on patrol with the Minutemen, vigilantes intent on stopping illegal immigration. Clearly aware of his tendencies, Saunders tells himself: "Stop trying so hard to be Johnny Compassion." He and the Minutemen get lost in the brush, pick each other up, then spend a night chatting about ballet and Renaissance fairs while guarding the border with an impressive arsenal. Though he may be a Liberal and they Gun-Toting Right-Wingers, Saunders detects "the ornery-eye-twinkle-of-possible-friendship." He astutely surmises that some people, "imagining the great What Is Out There, imagine it intends doom for them; others imagine there is something out there that may be suffering and in need of their help." When it comes to writing about literature, however, all of the Seeming Naïveté that sometimes mars the political pieces falls away. What remains is a sophisticate's bright wonder. Saunders delivers canny insights only afforded a writer who himself has been lost in the Impenetrable Jungles of Narrative and has hacked his way out week by despairing week. By itself, the essay on Donald Barthelme's short story "The School" constitutes an entire M.RA. program in 11 pages, and - please note, aspiring writers - it's thousands of dollars cheaper. Saunders describes how Barthelme constructs the story as a series of deaths ranging from pets to classmates. Such a faithfully followed, even inventive pattern is not enough, however. If that's all a writer contrives, he's "treating you like a dumb beast, endlessly fascinated by a swinging weight on a cord." The gift for sympathy Saunders exercises to uneven effect in the reported pieces finds apt outlet in a superb essay about "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." He appears to inhabit Mark Twain's head, so astute is his sense of how the narrative must have evolved. Saunders argues that Twain's comic novel was "doing things a comic novel was not supposed to do, and yet he sort of liked it." He regards the book's disastrous ending as the unsatisfactory resolution of a split within Twain, between the revolutionary who believed that blacks were full-fledged humans and the reactionary who wasn't sure. In an essay about Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five," Saunders gives an account of his own evolution as a writer. Under the influence of Hemingway, he'd been under the impression that "great writing required a Terrible Event One Had Witnessed." Saunders traveled the globe in search of Said Event but as he disarmingly puts it, he was "too cautious to be blown up or see anything horrific." Vonnegut's novel, which he read at 23 while on a seismic crew in Sumatra, liberated him from being a "control freak" of a writer. "Slaughterhouse Five" "felt like an ode to the abandonment of control, a disavowal of mastery." These are still good words for a writer again rounding the globe to live by, even A Kind-Hearted One. Saunders once thought 'great writing required a Terrible Event One Had Witnessed.' Will Blythe is the author of "To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
All the qualities that make Saunders' bristling, inventive short stories distinctive and affecting are present in his rollicking yet piercing essays: droll wit, love of life, high attention to language, satire, and metaphorical suppleness, which is what he credits Mark Twain with in his penetrating homage The United States of Huck. A MacArthur fellow whose fiction includes In Persuasion Nation (2006), Saunders also pays tribute to another guiding light, Kurt Vonnegut. A number of essays explicate Saunders' predilection for acrobatic parody and attunement to language's moral dimension, including the exhilarating title essay, which uses an ingenious analogy to explain the precipitous dumbing down of the media and the pernicious results. Saunders is also uncommonly funny, dynamic, and incisive in his reporting on his adventures on the border with a group of quirky and inept Minutemen, his visit to the spanking-new and massively opulent city of Dubai, and his participation in a mystifying vigil in Nepal. With a keen sense of the absurd, incandescent creativity, and abiding empathy, Saunders catapults the essay into new and thrilling directions.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Best known for his absurdist, sci-fi-tinged short stories, Saunders (In Persuasion Nation) offers up an assortment of styles in his first nonfiction collection. Humor pieces from the New Yorker like "Ask the Optimist," in which a newspaper advice column spins out of control, reflect the gleeful insanity of his fiction, while others display more earnestness, falling short of his best work. In the title essay, for example, his lament over the degraded quality of American media between the trial of O.J. Simpson and the 9/11 terrorist attacks is indistinguishable from the complaints of any number of cultural commentators. Fortunately, longer travel pieces written for GQ, where Saunders wanders through the gleaming luxury hotels of Dubai or keeps an overnight vigil over a teenage boy meditating in the Nepalese jungle, are enriched by his eye for odd detail and compassion for the people he encounters. He also discusses some of his most important literary influences, including Slaughterhouse Five and Johnny Tremain (he holds up the latter as "my first model of beautiful compression"-the novel that made him want to be a writer). Despite a few rough spots, these essays contain much to delight. (Sept. 8) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Saunders, best known as a fiction writer (e.g., CivilWarLand in Bad Decline), uses the skills he's honed writing for The New Yorker, GQ, and Harper's to take on politics, literature, and religion in his first essay collection. In the title piece, he discusses the many ways in which the media have become a "braindead megaphone." He compares on-air coverage of celebrity news (from the O.J. Simpson Bronco chase to Paris Hilton's incarceration) with that of hard news (e.g., the famine in Darfur and America's dependency on oil), finding the traditional television media caving to the pressure for ratings and advertising. If blame is to be assigned, he writes, a "lazy media, false promises, and political doublespeak" are the culprits. In other essays, Saunders wonders what has happened to the spirit and wisdom of Mark Twain and Kurt Vonnegut in American letters. "Mr. Vonnegut in Sumatra" is particularly timely and poignant. This lively read, by turns funny, frightening, and fascinating, is recommended for all public and academic libraries with large nonfiction collections.-Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
This provocatively engaging collection illuminates the thought processes of one of America's masters of literary gamesmanship. Though the magazine pieces that Saunders (In Persuasion Nation, 2006, etc.) has written for the likes of the New Yorker, Harper's and GQ provide an inviting introduction to the unique stylist, devoted fans of his fiction will find their appreciation (and understanding) deepened as the author analyzes the effects that the writing of others has had on him. Not surprisingly, the Chicago-raised writer turned "Eastern liberal" (his description) expresses affinity and affection for such native Midwestern humorists as Kurt Vonnegut (whom he celebrates as a seminal influence) and Mark Twain, while his geometric analysis of a short story by fellow experimentalist Donald Barthelme provides insight into both Barthelme and Saunders. Especially revelatory is "Thank You, Esther Forbes," in which Saunders details how his childhood reading of that author's award-winning Johnny Tremain showed him how and why sentences matter. Yet things are never as straightforward as they seem with Saunders, and what this volume characterizes as "essays" is in fact a typically tricky mix from a writer who resists pigeonholing. Pieces such as "A Survey of the Literature," "Ask the Optimist!," "Woof: A Plea of Sorts" and the utopian closer, "Manifesto: A Press Release From PRKA" (kind of the prose equivalent of John Lennon's "Imagine"), could have fit just as easily into one of his story collections. Longer, reported pieces such as "The Great Divider" (on border immigration issues) and "Buddha Boy" (on a seemingly miraculous meditator) display a profound empathy that resists knee-jerk response. Perhaps the most conventional essay here, and one of the most powerful, is the title piece that opens the collection. Saunders employs "The Braindead Megaphone" as a metaphor for mass media and shows how arguably talented, intelligent individuals have achieved a collective effect of dumbing down the national discourse. Much smarter and more stimulating than the typical author's clean-out-the-closet collection. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
